With the development of network technology and household appliance industry, household appliances can now be connected to a network. This type of household appliances is called informational household appliances, or network household appliances. An informational household appliance can receive data from a network as well as feed its status information back to the network. An informational household appliance allows a user to obtain data of the informational household appliance located at home via the Internet, and thus enables the user to know status of the informational household appliance without being at home.
Two ways are available for storing data of an informational household appliance.
1. Data of the informational household appliance is stored in the informational household appliance itself. When a server or a terminal in a network is to obtain the data of the informational household appliance, the server or the terminal accesses the informational household appliance in a peer-to-peer (P2P) mode to obtain the data. In the P2P mode, the server or the terminal in the network may establish a direct communication link to the informational household appliance and obtain the data of the informational household appliance by directly accessing the informational household appliance. Therefore, all data of the informational household appliance are stored in the informational household appliance itself, which requires the informational household appliance to have great data storing and processing capability. However, currently a great variety of informational household appliances are available with big differences in their respective modes of data storing and communication, thus it is difficult to obtain data of all kinds of informational household appliances. Further, with said P2P mode, unified management on data of large amount of informational household appliances is not available, to manage and utilize household issues are not convenient for the user, and to manage and operate household services are not convenient for service providers.
2. An informational household appliance is connected to a web server via a gateway and transmits its data to the web server so as to provide the data to other servers or terminals in the network. A user obtains data of an informational household appliance located at home by accessing a web page and further manages the informational household appliance by accessing a web page. This way makes good use of existing Internet resources. However, network communication based on web page accessing is not in real time. Therefore, data of an informational household appliance updated by the web server can only be viewed when the user accesses the corresponding web page, hence the communication lacks time efficiency. Furthermore, a lot of page information (such as the font) needs to be transferred by the way of web page accessing, thus large amount of data is transferred during information exchange process. Still further, a mobile terminal is required to have capability of processing and displaying a web page. However, widely used mobile terminals are not suitable for web page accessing because of the limit of features of the mobile terminals themselves and relevant communication means, which makes it difficult for a user to use a mobile terminal to control and manage an informational household appliance. Additionally, by the way of web accessing, a network accessing mode of normal computers is employed, in which mode an informational household appliance is identified based on IP, while an IP address is frequently changed, hence the data of an informational household appliance still needs to be stored in the informational household appliance itself, and it is difficult for a web server to manage and update the data of the informational household appliance.